When starting development I used the contains method of the array which worked great without any performance issues. I later needed to allow searching with wildcards, this however introduces a performance issue in the events since I was forced to iterate over the array because the array contains method does not accept wildcards. I've tried the for each method of the arrays and also a simple while loop using regex for both methods to find a match with no success. By no success, I mean without the noticeable performance hit that I get (all animation stops) while the loop completes.

The array is 1D but has about 50K elements that are going to grow. I need to make wildcard searches for any text in the element. The only other thing I can think of is breaking the array up into categories with a dictionary but this is a huge pain. I guess I will have to do it and hope for some improvements.What a huge difference between using contains and a loop.

Never thought about searching through the json file. I will attempt trying this method first if not successful then I wil break the array into the dictionary. Hopefully I have some success with one of these methods and will update thread as soon as i do.

I had great success with searching through a loaded file. I'm going to stop researching the problem and consider the issue solved. If anyone is curious of what worked:(1) load entire json file into a global variable(data) at layout start(2) added delimiters to start and end of searchable text(3) query the data using "test regex" condition*** after using this method the animation stop until search completed no longer happens (or at least not noticeable on my test devices) ***